Full Metal Tortoise
by Beth Nottingham
Summary: What? No Aesop's Fables category? Oh well.   Full Metal Panic meets The Hare and the Tortoise. Rated for alcohol use, and likely to contain a bit of OOCness on Melissa's part. In her defense, she's quite drunk.


**Hey everybody! For my composition class, I have to do a bunch of rewrites of Aesop's fables. Fun stuff! I was too lazy to come up with my own characters, so I decided to use names from anime… and that caused the storyline to _mutate_ a little, heh heh heh… ^_^ **

**Written for class, posted for the heck of it, rated for alcohol use. Enjoy!**

Full Metal Tortoise

Melissa Mao was making a fool of herself, Tessa observed one evening as she passed the open door to the mess hall and saw the Sergeant Major, who was standing on a tabletop, regaling her comrades with yet another story about her perilous adventures. With a beer in one hand and the other free to gesticulate wildly for dramatic effect, the short-haired woman was almost certainly drunk, and judging by the sounds and smells issuing from her listeners, the others were in a similar state. Tessa sniffed in distaste as she prepared to continue on her way, when she heard Melissa slur out her name.

"Hey, Tessa!" Mao called, reeling where she stood and sloshing her drink over the heads of the inebriated crowd. Although the little Captain was fairly certain that it wasn't the wisest idea, she responded by entering the crammed room and making her way through the crowd to a comfortable talking distance.

"I was jus' tellin' these guys 'bout how things run here!" Melissa exclaimed, gesturing grandly at the soldiers who were looking up at her with hero-worship in their not-very-sober eyes. The silver-haired girl managed to avoid rolling her own eyes, though it was with much difficulty. Wasn't making a complete idiot of oneself _Sgt. Weber's_ job? Mao wasn't usually this… this… ridiculous!

"There ain't nobody faster in an A.S.!" Melissa boasted, thrusting her fist into the air as though she were making some sort of victorious speech. The soldiers cheered wildly, and Tessa was slinking back towards the door when the drunken Sergeant Major's next words found her ears.

"I dare anybody t' challenge me!" she exclaimed, causing Tessa to pause in mid-slink and glance thoughtfully over her shoulder at her wayward subordinate. "I'll take all comers!" Mao continued, "I'll take 'em and beat 'em all with one hand tied behind my back! C'mon! Anybody?"

"All right then, I challenge you to a race at noon tomorrow."

The words had slipped across Tessa's lips before she had fully formed the idea to speak in her mind. Her irritation by the Sergeant Major's behavior had completely bypassed her common sense, and she found herself in a little clearing amid the onlookers, who had all backed away when they heard her declaration. Melissa was silent for a moment, her beer-sodden brain taking more time to process what she had heard than it normally would. Then her mouth smeared itself into a lopsided grin and she glared down at her tiny foe with anticipation glittering in her eyes.

"Sounds like a blast!" she replied, and everyone within hearing-range cheered.

The next day was clear and bright; perfect weather for a race, but rather unpleasant for Melissa, who was suffering from the previous night's indulgent behavior. One of the Urzu team had amiably agreed to make a quick trip to the closest pharmacy for some eki kyabe, although his hung-over superior officer suspected that no medicine in the world would be able to completely soothe her pounding headache and churning stomach.

The task of explaining the plans she had made for that day at noon was delegated to Kurtz, since no one else wanted to volunteer to bear her wrath, and everyone knew he was already her favorite punching-bag.

Mao being Mao, the simple fact that she had been intoxicated at the time did not lessen the blow her pride would have taken had she stepped down from the challenge. Kurtz being Kurtz, no injury would prevent him from volunteering as the commentator for something so incredibly amusing.

So it was that when Tessa arrived at the large practice field behind the base she found one irritated Sergeant Major atop her A.S. and one blonde Sergeant holding a microphone and sporting a rather large fist-shaped bruise on his cheek.

"Okay everyone, here we go!" Kurtz exclaimed as Tessa clambered into the old machine she had opted to use and closed the hatch, powering up all her equipment as the blonde man informed anyone who lived under a rock about who was racing and what models of A.S. they were piloting.

"Ready!" Kurtz bellowed into his microphone, holding his handgun so it pointed toward the sky.

"Set!" he cried, cocking the gun. Tessa's hands tightened on the controls.

"GO!" he shouted, firing into the sky, and the race began.

Melissa sprang forward, her mecha's reinforced-steel feet gripping the rough terrain and propelling her forward, far ahead of her captain, who appeared to be walking slowly to maintain her balance. The eki kyabe had done its work, the Sergeant Major realized triumphantly, as Tessa's machine grew smaller and smaller in her A.S.'s rear sensors. Her head and stomach felt perfectly normal, even inside of the mecha, which was not the smoothest vehicle to pilot.

Confident of her pending victory, she slowed to a walk and flipped nimbly up onto her machine's hands, supporting herself with one and waving cheekily at the audience and then back at her opponent with the other. Tessa's radio was stubbornly silent, spurring the irascible mercenary to greater feats to try and get under her skin. She did cartwheels and back-flips, and ripped a tree up by its roots and whirled it like a baton.

This provoked one of the weapons technicians to take a cannon that was stored beside the field and shoot dud shells at her like baseballs. The audience roared and gasped and applauded as Melissa hit home run after home run, and she was having so much fun that she forgot about what she was supposed to be doing.

Suddenly, she saw everyone gasp and point and, focusing her sensors in the direction they were all staring in, she saw to her horror that the old A.S. of the Captain's was less than two meters from the finish line.

Dropping the tree as though it burned her, she sprinted towards the goal, but even at her fastest speed, there wasn't enough time. Tessa's iron feet crossed the painted white line a full three seconds before Mao's did.

The watchers erupted in cheers as Tessa stepped out of the cockpit and took a sweeping bow, and Melissa leaned her head on the monitor in front of her and cursed her stupidity. It didn't matter how fast she was; in the face of her careless crowd-pleasing performance, simple perseverance had been all that her opponent needed to outdo her.

_Owari _(The end)

**Good thing my teacher's an otaku, huh? I may post some others of this nature as separate oneshots if I feel like it. Feel free to review if you liked it; feel free to find another fic if you didn't. **

**~Beth Nottingham**


End file.
